Rules
of engagement As American universities rush to China, how much should they
push on issues of free expression and human rights?

By Mark F. Bernstein ’83

The whole world, it seems, is rushing to engage with China. Shaomin
Li *88, however, knows to be wary of getting too close.

In February 2001, Li, a naturalized American citizen and, at the time,
a professor of business at City University of Hong Kong, was arrested
while visiting Shenzhen, a city just over the Chinese border with Hong
Kong. The U.S. consulate was able to tell Li’s wife only that he
had been detained in an unspecified place for an unspecified crime.

Li had written about Taiwan-China relations and had received financial
support for his research from Taiwanese foundations. To many in the West,
Li was a political prisoner, the victim of a campaign by the Chinese government
to harass and silence critics of the regime. The House of Representatives
voted unanimously to call on President Bush to seek his release and that
of other academics detained in China. Harold Shapiro *64, then Princeton’s
president, wrote a letter to then-Chinese president Jiang Zemin on Li’s
behalf, and more than 250 Princeton students and faculty members —
along with other scholars — signed a petition calling for his release
and staged a rally at Reunions.

Chinese officials interrogated Li for five months before charging him
as a Taiwanese spy. After a three-hour trial, he was convicted and deported.

Whether the government’s decision to expel Li rather than imprison
him was the result of Western pressure is an unanswered question. Many
observers of the case believe the pressure from academia helped —
after all, they say, the Chinese need access to top Western universities,
particularly in the sciences, if their economy is to grow. Li himself
believes that universities, no less than governments, have influence,
especially if they work together. “The Chinese don’t want
to be isolated,” says Li, who is now a professor of management at
Old Dominion University in Virginia. “They can’t afford to
go back to the Maoist era. If Princeton, Harvard [and other Western universities]
all hold a clear principle to China on human rights and democracy, then
the Chinese regime would be forced to listen.”

For universities and business alike, the roaring Chinese market —
with a population of 1.3 billion and a $2.26 trillion economy that grows
by almost 10 percent each year — is too lucrative an opportunity
to miss. China is now the world’s second-largest economy —
a huge potential source of customers for businesses and of top students
for American universities. That’s good, says the U.S. government,
which believes that Chinese who study in America and other Western democracies
— or have contact with American-style capitalism at home —
will come to embrace Western values. But others question whether the price
of engaging China is compromise on important values.

“Princeton should ask itself, ‘What am I here for?’”
Ying-shih Yu suggests about the University’s growing role in China.
“If we are there for truth, pursue truth no matter what the cost
is.” Yu, a Chinese native, is the Gordon Wu ’58 Professor
of Chinese Studies emeritus, and recently the co-winner of the John W.
Kluge Prize for the Study of Humanity. He is also perhaps the most widely
read contemporary historian writing in Chinese — a scholar of great
influence in both the East and West — and is well known for his
support for the Chinese democracy movement. He has been a particular supporter
of the young activists who left their homeland after the suppression of
protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and still refuses to travel to China
because of his dislike for the Communist regime.

“Human dignity,” he says, “is a basic right. The Chinese
have been searching for freedom throughout their history.” Yu, however,
is loath to prescribe specific steps that Western universities or academics
should take in support of the pursuit of truth, calling it a matter for
each person to judge for himself or herself.

In 2004, Shirley Tilghman became the first Princeton president to visit
China, a trip made with the object of increasing the University’s
visibility in a country that is increasingly a source of students. During
three whirlwind days in the country — part of a wider Asian tour
in which she was accompanied by Dean of the Graduate College William Russel,
Dean of Admission Janet Rapelye, and other top University officials —
Tilghman met with Princeton alumni, the American ambassador, and Chinese
officials and educators. She also toured a stem cell research laboratory
and taped several interviews.

The goal of the trip was “to encourage excellent students from
China to consider studying at Princeton and to encourage scholarly exchange,”
says Robert K. Durkee ’69, Princeton’s vice president and
secretary. Since Tilghman’s journey, several other University officials
have made trips, including representatives of the undergraduate admission
office; Anne-Marie Slaughter ’80, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School;
and Maria Klawe, then the dean of the School of Engineering and Applied
Science.

Indeed, China has seen a parade of American university presidents in
recent years. No American university tops Yale in its courtship of the
Chinese, however; that university participates in 80 academic collaborations
with China and maintains established partnerships with 45 Chinese universities,
government agencies, and research institutions. Chinese president Hu Jintao
spoke at Yale in 2006, and shortly afterward the Chinese government made
the university one of only 40 foreign institutions permitted to buy highly
restricted but very valuable “A-shares” in Chinese businesses.
(Princeton is considering whether to apply for that status, according
to Andrew Golden, the president of Princo, Princeton’s investment
arm.)

Compared to Yale, certainly, Princeton’s presence in China is
relatively small. Princeton’s principal presence in China is Princeton-in-Beijing,
which for the last 14 years has provided an intensive Chinese language
study program hosted by Beijing Normal University. The Tibet Site Seminar,
a four-year project that Princeton hosts, will take a team of Ph.D. students
to study in Tibet next summer. And the Princeton-Harvard China & the
World Program, a joint undertaking established in 2005, will offer fellowships
to help promote the study of China in the United States (although it will
not have a formal presence in China). Among other subjects, the program
will promote study of “China’s responses to the diffusion
of global norms.”

Western universities are not used to working in a culture that restricts
what can be said or taught. How should they respond to attempts to restrict
their own freedom of expression when acting in China? Is it part of their
mission to try to spread democratic values? Should Western universities
acquiesce in restrictions on intellectual freedoms by the Chinese government
as a cost of doing business there? Do they exert more influence over Chinese
behavior by continued and expanded engagement — or by reproach and
protest?

In 1992, when Professor of East Asian Studies C.P. Chou, co-director
of the highly regarded Princeton-in-Beijing language program, first presented
to Chinese authorities the textbook he proposed to use, the officials
physically tore out the preface, epilogue, a cartoon, and some articles.
In 2000, Chou was told to modify another textbook because it was thought
to portray the country in an unflattering light. Chou eventually learned
that someone at Beijing Normal University had criticized the book.

In this case, the program cooperated and removed the offending pages.
“It was a difficult decision,” Chou says, “but sometimes
I have to say ‘yes’ [to acceding to Chinese demands].”
While Chou says he was willing to make these deletions, he says he would
refuse to teach anything that is untrue, calling that sort of act the
spreading of propaganda.

Chou’s co-director, Professor of East Asian Studies Perry Link,
takes a similar view. “Yes, it was worth toeing the line”
in this instance, he says. “I don’t mind ripping a few pages
out of a textbook in order to have a whole Chinese language program.”
He adds that he also thinks such restrictions are self-defeating from
the government’s standpoint. “Whenever you censor a textbook
and tear pages out, students become super-interested” in the excised
material, he says, “so it’s counterproductive.”

Pages torn from books have not been the only problem for Princeton-in-Beijing.
In 1996, Link was denied entry to China after years of traveling there,
and has not been able to obtain a visa since. Although he never received
an explanation for his blacklisting, Link believes it is due to his role
in helping a noted Chinese dissident and his wife escape to the U.S. embassy
in Beijing immediately after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Such
blacklisting, he says, is not uncommon and has a “vague intimidating
effect” on those studying China, including the fact that researchers
worry about getting on the blacklist and so shy away from working on or
speaking out on topics that Chinese authorities might find offensive.
The graduate students who helped Link and his co-editor Andrew Nathan,
at Columbia University, translate documents for a book about the massacre,
The Tiananmen Papers, for example, did not want their names associated
with the book — a heavy price for a young scholar to pay in the
publication-centered world of academe. “How healthy is democratic
theory when the China case is avoided or handled with kid gloves?”
Link asks.

Link took President Tilghman to task for not raising the subject of
his blacklisting with Chinese officials while on her high-profile trip
to China in 2004, though she did raise the issue of the inability of Chinese
students to obtain American visas due to post-9/11 restrictions. That
view is shared by Bruce Gilley *06, the author of China’s Democratic
Future, who believes that the blacklisting of China-studies scholars,
and the arrest of Chinese academics, are important topics for American
university leaders, including those at Princeton, to raise. “What
[not addressing the topic] says to China is that they don’t have
to worry about it,” Gilley says. “Princeton hasn’t made
academic freedom [in China] a top priority. They just haven’t.”

Since the Tiananmen Square crackdown, there have been few instances
in which Western universities or scholarly organizations have cut back
on their engagement with China as a means of protesting Chinese human-rights
abuses. Yet professor Stanley Katz, the director of the Princeton University
Center for Arts and Cultural Policy and president emeritus of the American
Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), says that even those actions were
unwise. Katz, who was in Shanghai on his way to Beijing at the time of
the 1989 uprising, recalls that he was “appalled” to learn
that the National Academy of Sciences was cutting off ties to China in
protest. Meeting immediately upon his return with the president of the
NAS, Katz argued that disengagement with China was “the last thing
we ought to be doing because the people we care about there are the ones
most at risk.” (The NAS re-established ties with China two years
later.)

Katz, who now chairs an ACLS group working to extend scholarly ties
to Cuba, argues that while it may be cathartic to curtail relations with
an unfriendly government as a form of protest, it is usually counterproductive.
“I always prefer to err on the side of cooperation,” he says,
and suggests that one reason Cuba remains a repressive regime is because
the longstanding U.S. trade embargo has prevented the pollination of democratic
ideas.

Sociology professor Gilbert Rozman, who has written extensively about
contemporary Chinese and Asian culture, also argues that American engagement
in China is far more beneficial — to both countries — than
protests that could curtail the relationship. He says this even though
he himself has been denied an entry visa to China since 2002; as with
Link, he has received no explanation. Nevertheless, citing China’s
potential strategic importance in international affairs, he says: “Gaining
Chinese cooperation on nuclear issues [with respect to proliferation in
North Korea] is far more important than specific human-rights abuses.”

Princeton officials believe that chastising the Chinese government about
Link’s blacklisting, and about academic freedom in general, would
have been unproductive and harmful, embarrassing the Chinese and hardening
their position. Durkee says Tilghman did not speak out about Link’s
blacklisting during her China trip because University officials had been
advised beforehand that the only way to make progress on such issues was
by discussions “at the very highest levels of the Chinese government.”
He says that Tilghman did raise the issues with the U.S. ambassador, who
could raise it with the Chinese, but that Princeton has not been told
if any action was taken. Link remains on the blacklist.

“You always have to start these conversations [with the Chinese]
by emphasizing that fundamentally, [Princeton] is about teaching and research,”
Durkee says. “We certainly hope that, over time, through engagement
in teaching and research, we would have a positive impact on freedom in
China, both through the Chinese students who come here and through the
active programs we have there.” And he notes that Princeton has
engaged China in other ways. In 1989, with a grant from John Elliott ’51,
who died in 1997, Princeton hosted 26 Chinese students who had fled the
country following the Tiananmen Square massacre. Prince-ton is also a
member of the Fair Labor Association, a consortium of universities that
monitors companies to ensure that they do not employ sweatshop labor.

Others also suggest that a heavy-handed approach with China simply would
not work. “There’s an attitude from the U.S. side that’s
self-righteous ... like we’re always doing something right,”
says Chou. “We should try to know more about them, how their system
works” before making prescriptions, he counsels, noting that China’s
history and traditions are unlike those of the United States.

“I think the proper role for a university is to aggressively engage
scholars for collaborative research and teaching,” says Eva Lerner-Lam
’76, a transportation consultant who has worked with Chinese businesses
and lives part-time in Beijing. “If you’re invited by a foreign
university, they have their own rules. If you don’t like it, you
can turn around and go back. It’s certainly appropriate for us to
expose [human-rights abuses]. But to influence it — I don’t
know that that’s our role.”

Other Western organizations — including companies that focus on
information and communications technology — have faced similar dilemmas
in dealing with free expression in China. Last summer, Google took flak
for its decision to allow the Chinese government to censor information
on its Web browser. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland,
last winter, Google CEO Eric Schmidt ’76 defended the company’s
actions: “We concluded that although we weren’t wild about
the restrictions, it was even worse to not try to serve those users at
all.”

YoungSuk Chi ’83, vice chairman of the publishing company Elsevier,
recalls his role as chairman of Random House Asia in publishing Robert
L. Kuhn’s 2005 book, The Man Who Changed China, a biography
of former Chinese president Jiang Zemin. Both inside and outside the company,
there were complaints that the book inevitably would be a propaganda piece,
as Kuhn would have the cooperation of former and current Chinese officials
but would be limited in the type of research he could conduct. Nonetheless,
Chi approved the project, believing that a less-than-comprehensive book
was better than none at all. “What I want is a seat at the table,
to be able to discuss these issues,” says Chi, the son of Korean
diplomats. “I value the ability to sit at the table too much to
jeopardize the ability to be invited.”

One businessman who has been successful in engaging the Chinese on human-rights
issues is John Kamm ’72, a former vice president of the Occidental
Chemical Co. who in 1991 founded the Dui Hua foundation (the word means
“dialogue” in Chinese), which is dedicated to improving human
rights in China. In particular, Kamm and the foundation work to obtain
information about Chinese political prisoners; he believes that the foundation
has assisted approximately 400 prisoners. The secret, Kamm argues, is
not whether pressure is applied, but how it is applied. Success in dealing
with China requires a balance between engagement and pressure —
what he calls “walking the tightrope,” or what a New York
Times reporter more colorfully called the practice of “tactical
obsequiousness,” like the stroking and flattering of Chinese counterparts.
That job, Kamm believes, is better suited to businessmen than to academics.
“Business types,” he tells PAW, “have to sell really
hard things. It’s hard to sell the Chinese government on releasing
political prisoners. ... I’m a little more skeptical about my friends
in the academic community being able to walk that tightrope.”

For all their efforts in China, it seems likely that American universities
will exercise their greatest influence over the Chinese who travel to
this country to study. Chinese students at Princeton learn lessons about
freedom of conscience and freedom of inquiry that they then take back
home with them, supporters of engagement insist. Writing in the December
2006 issue of The Atlantic, James Fallows marveled at the cadre
of young Chinese who have gone back to work in their own country after
studying in the United States. “From being in the United States,
many of them learned ... many traits still very difficult to cultivate
in China itself. These include professional managerial skills; the idea
of open democratic debate, even with one’s elders; techniques for
funding start-up firms and other organizational structures that encourage
innovation; and a sense that bribery, petty or grand-scale, is at least
in principle wrong.”

That’s what American university leaders want to see. “I
recognize that people here have a lot more freedom” than do people
in China, says Shuyang Pan, a Princeton graduate student in chemical engineering
and president of the Association of Chinese Students and Scholars, a nationwide
organization that some believe is supported by the Beijing government.
But he continues: Political freedom is better suited to a wealthy, well-educated
country such as the United States than to China, which still has a large
agricultural and illiterate population. “They [Chinese citizens]
would just listen to whatever people told them,” Pan says, “and
that would cause chaos.”

Pan says he intends to return to China after finishing his work here.
But when it is suggested that studying in the United States has given
him a greater appreciation of democracy, he is quick to correct that mischaracterization.
“I didn’t say I had a greater appreciation of it,”
he insists. “I said I had a greater understanding.”